


compare myself to the people of your past, the ones I know nothing about

by jamieisntgay



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Best Friends, Crushes, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Manga & Anime, Teen Crush
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:28:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29900412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamieisntgay/pseuds/jamieisntgay
Summary: Reki asks questions that he never lets Langa answer.
Relationships: Hasegawa Langa/Kyan Reki
Comments: 3
Kudos: 53





	compare myself to the people of your past, the ones I know nothing about

**Author's Note:**

> work based on the english dub preview for episode two, where Reki asks alot of questions and Langa likes to talk about feelings. I might do a part two to this, depending on if that's something you guys would like. This is like, my second work I've done in forever, so mostly I'm just trying to improve my skills. 
> 
> twitter @jamieisntgay

_"Do you miss them?"_

_"Who?"_

Langa turned slightly to look at the boy beside him, staring back at Reki's dead-pan face, as if it should be obvious who this anonymous 'who' was. It was just the two of them, lying on their stomachs on Reki's bed, who had been trying to find a way to prop up his phone using a stack of school books for the past five minutes so they could watch this documentary about some legendary skateboarder Langa had never heard of, even though Reki claimed it was 'practically illegal according to skater law', which was definitely just something he made up on the spot.

This is where Langa found himself most nights now, and it almost felt bizzare to think there was a time before this, a time before he knew Reki. He spent almost every single second of everyday with him, even when he wasn't physically there.

He'd wake up. Send him a good morning text, and Reki would text to ask him if they were still going to school today together, and the answer was yes, it was always yes, because Langa wouldn't have it any other way.

They'd go to school. Together.

They'd spend all day at school. Their classes, their lunch times, their free study periods. Always together.

Sometimes, their routine after school changed. Mostly they'd go to the skatepark or they'd go to S, other times when they had a shift, they'd go to work together, or they'd go back to Reki's house, so he could help Langa study, which was so much more difficult, now that everything was in a language he could sometimes only stumble through, so Reki had to work as a human translator to break the words down for him.

Together.

Sometimes, Langa would stay the night. There wasn't even a point putting away the blow-up mattress that took up half of the room on Reki's bedroom floor, because Langa practically lived there now, and when he didn't stay the night, it didn't matter, because they'd end up just on the phone all night anyway, whether through text or call, and Langa would wish him good night.

But it was always together. They did everything together, as if they always had.

Reki had dropped the phone though, letting it fall face down on his mattress as he looked at him, obviously trying to raise one eyebrow, yet failing miserably, so he was just there with two eyebrows raised while he violently squinted one eye, as if he was staring directly into the sun.

"Your Canadian friends! Obviously!" The other exclaimed, opening his arms in a dramatic fashion, as if it was the most obvious question in the world.

"What's there to talk about?" Langa asked, not getting it. He didn't get it, get why Reki asked so many questions about Canada, about his life before he came here, before they were friends. He knew the basics- Langa went to highschool, like every other Canadian kid did, he liked snowboarding, like most Canadian kids do. Then his dad died, and now he was here.

But Reki kept prying, like pulling teeth, kept wanting to get into the nitty gritty of it all, pulling at that throbbing pain Langa felt deep inside him, this tiredness, no, this exhaustion, inside his very being.

"You literally like, NEVER talk about Canada unless I ask and even then you barely say anything," Reki's voice interrupted his thinking, his tone saying 'I'm joking' but his eyes just not meeting his, looking over at the wall behind him, just barely avoiding eye contact.

"Sometimes it makes me think that you're afraid I'll think you'd rather go back there then stay here, or that your old friends were just way cooler thrn me." He still spoke as if he was talking about something casual, it was the same tone he used when he would laugh at Langa for tripping over a twig while skateboarding, but his features looked as if they told another story.

Do people really think these things? Did Reki really compare himself to a group of people he knew nothing about, from a country that was five thousand miles away? Are people supposed to think these things? Is this a fault of Langa's or is this just Reki being Reki?

He frowned, still taking his questions into consideration. There was things he missed about Canada. He missed snowboarding, but that was obvious, and he missed snow, but that was something everyone knew too. He missed not having to speak and be taught in a language he just wasn't one-hundred percent sure of, especially since it was hard enough understanding people without this newly added challenge.

He missed his dad.

He wasn't certain if anyone knew that, but maybe that was his own fault for doing everything he could to not talk about it. Those feelings, they were just too much.

Were friends something he missed? If they were, would he be sitting here, questioning it, wondering if he did?

Had they even texted him since he got here? Had he messaged them? Did they think about him, or was he just selfish for not wasting even a second of his day, pondering what they might be doing?

He longed for snowboarding. That rush, that thrill, the thing that kept him alive. Skateboarding gave him that.

Reki gave him that.

His old friends didn't give him this high, like Reki did. He didn't spend nearly half as much time with them as he does with someone who should just be a stranger. In fact, it felt like he purposefully tried to spend as much time away from them as he could, because minutes dragged by like hours around them, because he just couldn't click, just couldn't get it. It was like everyone was in on some kind of joke, and nobody wanted to tell Langa what it was.

"Do you ever feel like you just don't... understand people?" He finally broke the silence, looking at Reki's amber eyes with his blue ones. He knew his eyes, they were bright and warm, alive. These eyes spoke and they told jokes and meaningless stories and the secrets to how to achieve happiness in this universe.

What colour were his friends eyes? Did they speak to him like Reki's did? Did his friends have eyes at all? Perhaps they didn't, perhaps his old friends were faceless and nameless and shared the same voice that was just Langa's voice when he spoke in his head and that's why it was so hard to tell them apart?

"Uh, what?" That caught Reki off guard, probably because apparently, according to Reki anyway, it was 'super weird' that Langa talked and asked about feelings so much, but it didn't matter, because Langa would speak nonsense things and Reki would listen anyways.

Did the people he knew before listen?

Did Langa ever speak?

_Did they ever speak to each other?_

He swallowed dryly, letting out a breath through his nose as he turned his head, his usually pale cheeks flushed, trying to hide it by using his hand to push his blue hair behind his ear, trying to find his voice before he went on.

"Like... Like you're just friends because that's what people do, they have friends. But you don't really get them," he shrugged, taking the cuff of the sleeve into his hand and clutching onto it nervously. In his head, he didn't think Reki would understand.

"My friends from Canada, we never really hung out the way we do. Like, we hung out, obviously, but it all just kind of felt like it was for appearances? And if something ever happened where other people stopped liking us for whatever reason, you'd just get kicked out of the group. Like you were replaceable."

He hadn't really thought of it much until he said it out loud, but now he couldn't help but realise that that's how his life simply was back home. He was friends with these people who didn't care for him, didn't care for his interests, his thoughts or dreams. It was just surface level. Hanging out with them made him look good, and vice versa, but if Langa were to ever mess up, they wouldn't hesitate to turn their backs on him and pretend they had never known him in the first place.

"Do you think of me as that? Replaceable?" Reki asked, finally returning to making eye contact, and all Langa could think was how could Reki even question that for a second, when there was absolutely nobody like him to begin with.

Langa tried to force himself to think of Reki as some other faceless person, as someone he could just swap out with someone else, but he couldn't, he couldn't do that because nobody else would ever be able to make him feel like this, and he wanted to tell him that so badly, tell him that he could never be replaced, tell him that he didn't know what he would even do with himself if they were to ever stop talking, but he couldn't even get to begin his sentence before Reki had landed a playful punch on his shoulder, bursting out laughing.

"Dude, I'm joking. God, not all of us are obsessed with talking about stuff like this," the redhead chuckled, just a little too long, a little too _loud_ , stopping as he leaned over off his bed slightly, sticking his hand underneath as he rummaged out an old phone cover, the ones that were shaped like a book, sticking his phone inside it, saying,"Oh my god, I'm a genius, I forgot my mom used to buy me phone covers like this all the time because I was constantly smashing my phone, they're super lame looking, this is literally the same phone case my gran has, but if you sit it up like this, you can balance your phone up. Tada!"

Was Reki really just going to pretend that hadn't happened? Pretend they just didn't have that conversation, pretend he didn't just ask him that?

"What?"

"I... It would have been more impressive if you had come up with that five minutes ago," Langa pointed out to him, deciding not to push it, at least not now, not like this, but he made a mental note that he had to, had to ask, had to know what was Reki really thinking, had to let Reki know what he was really feeling, he wouldn't let it be something that merely happened that would be forgotten.

"Shut up," he grumbled back as he started up the documentary, Langa had forgotten that's what they were even doing in the first place because it had felt like a lifetime ago, and he couldn't even remember what was playing right in front of him as it happened, because his mind seemed to be only able to concentrate on the other boy beside him, on his words.

_Do you think of me as that?_

_Replaceable?_

But he wasn't, and how could he be? The boy who introduced him to this, this world, to skateboarding, to S, the one who was able to pinpoint exactly the type of board he would need just by watching his movements for a handful of moments, and then create it himself from scratch? The person who he had learnt almost everything about skateboarding from, even when it felt like Langa was absolutely hopeless at it? Anyone else would have given up after seeing how bad Langa was, but Reki didn't.

The boy who was constantly cracking jokes and smiling and laughing and showed affection through touch, and was selfless and cared so much about people, even if they had given him every reason not to before?

The boy who gave him this feeling that Langa couldn't describe as anything but feeling completely and totally alive.

There was absolutely nobody in this world who could even begin to compare to Reki, because he was simply just irreplaceable.

_And he deserved to know that._


End file.
